A journey of the mind afloat in space and time. An emotion capture. Arresting images and some great poems and lyrics.

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Tag Archives: Tube

I spent years commuting to the big city on the train. It is a journey of 1 hour 20 mins on a good day, 1 hour 30 mins mostly. So that’s 3 hours daily on a train.

Say that to many people and they think you are crazy. They think this is 3 hours a day wasted. How little they know.

Much of my time on the train was spent working. In fact it was the time getting to and from the train that had the potential to be “wasted”. But you only waste time if you choose to do nothing with it.

That’s why I connect so well with the image above. This lady on the Tube is not wasting time, she is eating it up, stealing precious moments for herself. On a commute I had time to hear the music I want to hear, read books, write poetry. Downloading podcasts gives me access to lectures on Byzantine emperors, audio books of many of the classics, some of them made hilarious by dreadful pronunciations by the narrator.

This photograph was taken by Matt Crabtree who said

‘One morning in 2016, on a tube journey into central London, I looked up to see a lady dressed in a velvet hood, seated in a classical, timeless pose. Immediately, a 16th-century Flemish painting came to mind. I looked around and suddenly found I couldn’t see anything else but people held in their own Renaissance-like, personal moments’.

I get that too, how travelling on public transport is like starring in your own reality TV show. A stream of people pass each day through your life. You have the regular characters and some who only appear in a single episode. Each has their own part in the story and it is a wonderful story. The story of life.